P67 Motherboard Round-up: Asus, Fatal1ty, GB, MSI

Name: P67 Motherboard Round-up: Asus, Fatal1ty, GB, MSI - Page 7
Brand: P67

by Mathew Miranda — Friday, June 17, 2011, 12:00 PM EDT

Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA 2011

Page 7: Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA 2011

How we configured our test systems: Before testing, we visited each motherboard's product page to download the latest BIOS available. Then we flashed the BIOS to the latest revision and moved on to the next step. When configuring our test systems for this article, we set each board to its optimized defaults. After saving the settings, we re-entered the BIOS and manually set the memory for DDR3-1866 with CAS 9 timings. The hard drive was formatted, and Windows 7 Pro 64-bit installed. Once the Win 7 installation completed, we updated the OS and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test System

Intel Inside

Motherboards:
ASRock Fatal1ty Professional

Asus P8P67 Pro

Asus P8P67 WS Revolution

Gigabyte P67A-UD5

MSI P67A-GD80

Processor:
Intel Core i5 2500K
(3.3GHz - Quad-Core)

RAM:
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB)
DDR3-1866 CAS 9-9-9-24

Graphics Card:
EVGA GeForce GTX 580

Hard Drive:
Western Digital 2TB

Software:
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
SiSoft SANDRA 2011
CrystalDiskMark 3.01
PCMark 7
Cinebench R11.5
3DMark 11
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

SiSoftware SANDRA 2011

Synthetic Benchmarks

We started off our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA suite on the test motherboards (CPU Arithmetic, Memory Bandwidth, and Physical Disks).

Our first set of benchmarks reveals some interesting results. During the processor arithmetic test, the Asus P8P67 WS Revolution from Asus held a tiny lead over the competition with an aggregate score of 71 GOPS. It pulled off first place in the memory bandwidth test as well. The ASRock Fatal1ty Pro just beat out MSI's GD80 for the highest multi-media score, but was clearly the superior board during the physical disk benchmark.